When your best just isn’t good enough: the Kindle Fire HD

Buying Amazon's 7-inch tablet? Get ready to overlook some flaws.

Amazon landed the first real volley in the 7-inch Android device market. Sure, the initial Kindle Fire was rough around the edges, but its shockingly low $199 price tag and integration with Amazon's services won over a few (million) consumers. Amazon sold tons of Kindle Fires in December 2011, and it wasn't long before the device held the top spot on the Android hardware charts.

The Kindle Fire struck us as the perfect tablet-y gift for a close relative who has been hemming and hawing about whether to get an iPad for two years straight—here's a Kindle Fire, dad, now stop e-mailing me every week about tablets. Once the gift-giving season had passed, though, what were people going to do—buy one for themselves? Many tablet and Android enthusiasts, perhaps foreseeing the coming of Google's own tablet, the Nexus 7, stayed away.

Google didn't just create a sleek, snappy, honest-to-goodness Jelly Bean tablet; it also slapped it with the same starting $199 price tag as the chunkier, lackadaisical Kindle Fire. The Nexus 7 came out of the starting gate as a better iPad competitor than the Kindle Fire had any hope of being, and the race was over almost before it had even started.

From left: iPad 2, Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 7, iPhone 4S.

It was almost unfair to compare the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 at all, given that Google freely admitted it was selling the Nexus 7 at cost, if not at a loss. Its price point belied the value of the product, and Google was (and is) counting on its deep pockets and robust advertising-based business model to keep Android's foot in the tablet door while other hardware manufacturers attempt to re-group.

But Amazon's narrative for the Kindle Fire was never all that different from Google's. The real money wasn't in the low-margin hardware but in the high-margin banana stand of Amazon's services and digital products: apps, music, movies, books, and all the rest. With the announcement of the HD versions, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made this much more explicit, with multiple mentions about the value of Amazon's "services" and how the Kindle Fire would act as portal for that content. With this new round of Kindle Fires, Amazon has focused on improving those services, adding things like "X-Ray" to books and movies (a feature which automatically identifies actors and authors for the media you're currently viewing), improving parental controls, and offering a ton of audiobooks. But good services by themselves just aren't enough to distance it from the rest of the hungry Android pack.

Despite Amazon's presence as a huge go-to for books and its growing movie and music business, in our view the company was (and still is) underestimating the importance of the delivery vector for those services—the actual hardware. The regular e-ink Kindles may be no technological feat, but they're designed for a single task, and they're good at it. A tablet should be more like a blank slate, able to handle any of the varying tasks that developers, the Web, and media can throw at it. But Amazon continues to get in the way of Android with its own fork of the OS—an even bigger crime than before, since the custom modifications are all to Ice Cream Sandwich, which will delay, perhaps substantially, the adoption of the newer Jelly Bean on the platform.

Evaluated on its own, the Kindle Fire is a passable tablet. It's not incredibly easy to use, nor is it all that quick. It has no standout assets aside from its deep connection to the Amazon ecosystem; whether or not that's an asset to you, the customer, depends entirely on your engagement and purchase history with Amazon. With all that, it accomplishes plenty of tablet tasks adequately enough to justify its $199 price.

However, the Kindle Fire can't be evaluated purely on its own, because no device exists in a vacuum. Google laid down the 7-inch tablet law in July, and the Kindle Fire flatly does not measure up. Worse, with Apple still expected by many to announce a 7-inch-ish tablet of its own soon, the Kindle Fire could well finish a distant third in its price and size bracket before the holiday shopping season even swings into full gear.

Look, touch, feel

The first Kindle Fire had a much narrower bezel on the long sides than on the short ones, but the Kindle Fire HD fills the border out all around, as we noted in our initial hands-on with the device. This gives it a chunkier, boxier look than the first Kindle Fire or the Nexus 7. We noted how portable and book-like the Nexus 7 felt in our hands as we carried it around; due to its shape, the Kindle Fire HD feels a bit more like an iPad.

At 13.9 ounces it's not very heavy, but it weighs more than the Nexus 7's 12 ounces. Thanks to the rounded and rubberized back, the Kindle Fire HD is more comfortable to hold than its predecessor, the Kindle Fire. The power button and a volume rocker sit flush with the edge at the top of the device, between a headphone jack and one of the speakers.
Two ports, mini-HDMI and Micro USB, are planted in the center of one long side, while the microphone is embedded on the other long side, around the edge from the front-facing camera. Whether I hold it in my left or right hand, my thumb seems to find its way to the spot right over the camera's lens; I'd worry that I'm going to end up with a lot of finger-grease smeared on it, as the glass doesn't seem particularly resistant to prints.

The 1280×800 display, so important to the branding that "HD" is even in the device's name, is the same size and resolution as the screen in the Nexus 7. And a very good screen it is, with crisp text and fine edges to visual elements throughout the OS. The display uses in-plane switching (IPS) to help widen the viewing angles to great effect, and there's no noticeable lighting unevenness along any of the panel's edges. We didn't see much difference in the color profiles or display of blacks between the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD. If the screens were presented on their own, we're not sure we'd be able to tell the difference. The Kindle Fire HD's display is a bit warmer and brighter at the highest setting.

Colors on the Nexus 7, left, Kindle Fire HD, center, and iPad 2.

The Kindle Fire HD's screen also has a polarizing filter and "anti-glare technology" that Amazon made specific mention of during its presentation. We compared the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 in direct sunlight, and both displays were perfectly visible. Whatever new layering processes or films Amazon has used don't seem to our eyes to make any appreciable difference.

162 Reader Comments

So basically, there are some improvements over the original Kindle Fire, but nothing ground-breaking or revolutionary.

What a shame. I like Amazon as a company, but it seems they have cut way too much on quality in order to be able to compete on price. Bezos seems way too desperate to capture a slice of the tablet market.

What is this Amazon "ecosystem" that people keep referring to. There is Instant Video, Cloud Player, Kindle books, Android apps, and regular shopping, all of which but Instant Video you can do on any Android device. Am I missing anything? With that removed there is zero reason to consider a Kindle Fire.

What is this Amazon "ecosystem" that people keep referring to. There is Instant Video, Cloud Player, Kindle books, Android apps, and regular shopping, all of which but Instant Video you can do on any Android device. Am I missing anything? With that removed there is zero reason to consider a Kindle Fire.

What is this Amazon "ecosystem" that people keep referring to. There is Instant Video, Cloud Player, Kindle books, Android apps, and regular shopping, all of which but Instant Video you can do on any Android device. Am I missing anything? With that removed there is zero reason to consider a Kindle Fire.

It's pretty clear that Amazon is using video as a driver for the tablet. Then once you are locked on their hardware to watch your video, they have the opportunity to constantly bombard you with product placement as you use your tablet. If the video wasn't their gateway drug then it would be available in the play store.

What is this Amazon "ecosystem" that people keep referring to. There is Instant Video, Cloud Player, Kindle books, Android apps, and regular shopping, all of which but Instant Video you can do on any Android device. Am I missing anything? With that removed there is zero reason to consider a Kindle Fire.

You can sideload Instant Video, I think. There's a bit of pokery to get it to log in, but once it does it apparently works just fine.

How is the app catalogue for productivity apps? I'm surprised that they're not getting slammed more for the "consumption device" emphasis. Is there any indicator that they'll create a stand/cover that makes typing easier? Or is the idea that you'd only use the device in-hand?

We didn't see much difference in the color profiles or display of blacks between the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD.

That's unfortunate. My one gripe about the Nexus 7, which is a fantastic little tablet otherwise, is the washed-out screen.

Fritzed wrote:

atfp wrote:

What is this Amazon "ecosystem" that people keep referring to. There is Instant Video, Cloud Player, Kindle books, Android apps, and regular shopping, all of which but Instant Video you can do on any Android device. Am I missing anything? With that removed there is zero reason to consider a Kindle Fire.

It's pretty clear that Amazon is using video as a driver for the tablet. Then once you are locked on their hardware to watch your video, they have the opportunity to constantly bombard you with product placement as you use your tablet. If the video wasn't their gateway drug then it would be available in the play store.

It's hard to be "locked on their hardware" when Prime Video is available on the iPad. I wonder if they just haven't gotten the licensing for a general Android release hashed out yet. Their CloudPlayer for music was similar - it was available on Android for months and months before it finally showed up on iOS.

It's pretty clear that Amazon is using video as a driver for the tablet. Then once you are locked on their hardware to watch your video, they have the opportunity to constantly bombard you with product placement as you use your tablet. If the video wasn't their gateway drug then it would be available in the play store.

It's hard to be "locked on their hardware" when Prime Video is available on the iPad. I wonder if they just haven't gotten the licensing for a general Android release hashed out yet. Their CloudPlayer for music was similar - it was available on Android for months and months before it finally showed up on iOS.

I'll admit that I wasn't aware it was available for iPod, but I find it hard to believe that there is a legitimate excuse for them not putting it on android proper, given that their own system is itself a minor android fork. I really believe this is only to differentiate themselves from the other android tablets that they are more directly competing with.

Boskone wrote:

You can sideload Instant Video, I think. There's a bit of pokery to get it to log in, but once it does it apparently works just fine.

I haven't tried it yet, though, so I can't say first-hand.

Thanks, I'll look into this. Although an unofficial workaround is unlikely to get me to ever actually buy a video there.

How is the app catalogue for productivity apps? I'm surprised that they're not getting slammed more for the "consumption device" emphasis. Is there any indicator that they'll create a stand/cover that makes typing easier? Or is the idea that you'd only use the device in-hand?

i think to the typing long passages Amazon would say, "what does that have to do with buying our ebooks and instant streaming?"

I'm not sure Google did themselves a favour with the Nexus 7... they built a reasonably priced, usable Android tablet, and thus prevented any of their partners from doing so. Unless they're in the market for the long haul, content to break even or lose money on every sale, I'm not sure how viable their strategy is.

Poor Amazon, thinking that almost-as-good could survive in this market.

I'll admit that I wasn't aware it was available for iPod, but I find it hard to believe that there is a legitimate excuse for them not putting it on android proper, given that their own system is itself a minor android fork. I really believe this is only to differentiate themselves from the other android tablets that they are more directly competing with.

Maybe. But the release strategy for their streaming apps is pretty inscrutable in general. Prime Video came out for iPad, but not iPhone/iPod (something I can't recall happening with any other streaming video app). And they killed an iOS app from a 3rd party that streamed CloudPlayer music, but didn't release anything themselves until almost a year later, IIRC. This piecemeal approach (compared to their Kindle strategy, which has been "put it on any device with a screen!") is why I wonder if there are some kind of licensing issues they've had to address on a case-by-case basis.

This is about what I expected. It's shaping up to be a dull fall. There are a few Android highlights, but

Unless we get a real WOW from Barnes and Noble this fall (which I doubt) or from Apple (It will probably just be "it's a iPad! But smaller!) our only hope seems to be new smartphones and maybe something really awesome on the Windows 8 side.

About what I expected from an Ars review in the tablet space. They've disliked the Fire from the beginning, and spent virtually no time with its unique features just as they did here. Furthermore, they never did a followup given the fact that Amazon released three major updates to the firmware of the first before Christmas, addressing most of the original criticisms. Something tells me they won't bother to follow up on this one either.

Virtually every other review of the FireHD has been very positive so far. While there are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the device, "Not simply using basic Android" is not one of them. Do we bash on Macs for "not just using Windows" or on a given Linux box for "not using Ubuntu"? Android is a branch of Linux, and we should embrace and encourage original thinking rather than just giving ourselves for free to Google. I'd like to see an article that actually took seriously the very different privacy implications for an Amazon(or B&N) device vs a device like the Nexus 7.

Meh, Ars reviews on tablets and phones have been questionable at best for a while now. Guess it was too much to hope for anything better this time around. I'll content myself with the fact that Nexus sales fell off a cliff after the first couple weeks, and that yet again the leaders this holiday are likely to be Apple and Amazon, with Microsoft as a dark horse with Surface.

Can't wait to see the inevitable Ars bash on Surface. You know its coming.

What is this Amazon "ecosystem" that people keep referring to. There is Instant Video, Cloud Player, Kindle books, Android apps, and regular shopping, all of which but Instant Video you can do on any Android device. Am I missing anything? With that removed there is zero reason to consider a Kindle Fire.

And the ipad now has an instant video app so it can do every thing the fire can do regarding the "ecosystem" or am I missing something????

I really wonder if Google didn't set the bar with the Nexus 7 features/price such that it's going to be really difficult for the free market to compete with it, ultimately harming the Android tablet market even while making what seems like a solid device. (With IMHO the first great tablet ad campaign from someone that isn't Apple, really solid all the way around.)

A little too early to make that call, but Amazon is a big company, with deep pockets, and experience doing this kind of thing by now, so if they can't pull it off I do wonder who's going to.

About what I expected from an Ars review in the tablet space. They've disliked the Fire from the beginning, and spent virtually no time with its unique features just as they did here. Furthermore, they never did a followup given the fact that Amazon released three major updates to the firmware of the first before Christmas, addressing most of the original criticisms. Something tells me they won't bother to follow up on this one either.

Virtually every other review of the FireHD has been very positive so far. While there are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the device, "Not simply using basic Android" is not one of them. Do we bash on Macs for "not just using Windows" or on a given Linux box for "not using Ubuntu"? Android is a branch of Linux, and we should embrace and encourage original thinking rather than just giving ourselves for free to Google. I'd like to see an article that actually took seriously the very different privacy implications for an Amazon(or B&N) device vs a device like the Nexus 7.

Meh, Ars reviews on tablets and phones have been questionable at best for a while now. Guess it was too much to hope for anything better this time around. I'll content myself with the fact that Nexus sales fell off a cliff after the first couple weeks, and that yet again the leaders this holiday are likely to be Apple and Amazon, with Microsoft as a dark horse with Surface.

Can't wait to see the inevitable Ars bash on Surface. You know its coming.

Actually, Ars' review of the original lined up pretty much identically with the actual experience of the one person I know who actually got a Fire last year: it didn't do anything better than any of the competitors, and lots of things worse. The main thing those firmware updates did functionally for the fellow I knew with one was make it harder for people to load vanilla Android: it certainly didn't make the email better, etc.

What is it that you see that the Fire actually offers as a benefit over, say, the Nexus 7 (at the same price point)?

I still don't understand how they're going to monitize this. Cash says that their "high margin"content is supposed to do that. But content isn't high margin, it's low margin.

It's I treating to see the difference between Apple and Amazon's business plans here. Apple make a high quality tablet, and makes a good profit on the sale, using that low margin content to give custo ers so ethi g to use it with, in addition to all the apps, fun and productivity both. Amazon is selling a smaller, cheaper tablet either at a loss or, at best, from what Bezos said, at break even, in order to get customers to buy their low margin content.

It's no wonder that Amazon just barely breaks even. It's not a good business model. At some point investors will understand that the 330 P/E they're giving Amazon's stock is more than ten times too high, and it will come crashing down. Maybe then, Amazon will stop taking losses on books and other content they sell.

Virtually every other review of the FireHD has been very positive so far. While there are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the device, "Not simply using basic Android" is not one of them.

Really? The reviews that I've seen have ranged from "It's pretty good for a non-iPad" to "meh". I wouldn't characterize any of them as being wildly positive. And most of the criticisms relate in one way or another to the custom Kindle interface sitting on top of Android, so I think "not running basic Android" is a perfectly fair complaint in this case.

Virtually every other review of the FireHD has been very positive so far.

Which just tells me virtually every other reviewer is not doing their job. Positive reviews teach nothing; critical reviews give you a point of dissection to compare against personal experience, or the experience of others, or against other criticisms, to form a balanced opinion.

Given that the Multiple In/Multiple Out (MIMO) WiFi technology is supposed to be one of the big improvements to the Kindle Fire HD, it pained us to not be able to get a good handle on how well the dual antennas work with benchmarks. We could only get a rough idea from an app we downloaded from Amazon's store named Network Monitor Mini, which parked a download/upload meter in the upper corner of the screen. Wit this as our guide, we never saw the download speed crack 6Mbps on the 2.4GHz band when various other gadgets and computers on our Internet connection were pulling down over 17Mbps on SpeedTest.net (or in SpeedTest's app, as the case may be). The Kindle Fire HD hovered around 1.5–2Mbps upload, which was about the limit of our connection. The improvisational methodology of this test renders its results unreliable for more than a quick estimation, as far as we're concerned, and we're disappointed that either developers don't see fit to put their tools on the app store, or that Amazon isn't allowing them in there. The best we can say is that the antennas work; we can't really prove how well.

What a horrible way to test WiFi performance. This is the type of "benchmark" that I would expect to see out of a newspaper, not Ars. At minimum, a local http server could have been used to test WiFi speeds.

What is this Amazon "ecosystem" that people keep referring to. There is Instant Video, Cloud Player, Kindle books, Android apps, and regular shopping, all of which but Instant Video you can do on any Android device. Am I missing anything? With that removed there is zero reason to consider a Kindle Fire.

I'm an iPad user and Amazon's two biggest parts of its "ecosystem" are Kindle Books and Instant Videos but both are available for the iPad so the only point for getting a Kindle Fire is the cheap price. In that case though you may as well get the Google Nexus 7 and have a much more capable tablet with the same screen size that is overall smaller. The expected iPad Mini in October would also be an excellent choice if priced right. There is no longer a reason to buy an Amazon Fire.

Casey, you can sideload most Android apps from the Google Play store, so I am at a loss as to why you couldn't run a decent benchmark.

I mean, complaining about the sparse content on the Amazon store is valid from a user perspective - most users are certainly never going to figure out how to sideload - but as a reviewer, it's really not too much to ask.

While there are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the device, "Not simply using basic Android" is not one of them. Do we bash on Macs for "not just using Windows" or on a given Linux box for "not using Ubuntu"?

Why not? It's a common theme in Android phone reviews. TouchWiz being the thing that is often complained about.

As for Macs "not just using Windows", false analogy is false.

Quote:

Meh, Ars reviews on tablets and phones have been questionable at best for a while now

...because you wish your favourite OS was more often praised and that fruity company you don't like should get much harsher treatment. Meh indeed.

I really wonder if Google didn't set the bar with the Nexus 7 features/price such that it's going to be really difficult for the free market to compete with it, ultimately harming the Android tablet market even while making what seems like a solid device. (With IMHO the first great tablet ad campaign from someone that isn't Apple, really solid all the way around.)

A little too early to make that call, but Amazon is a big company, with deep pockets, and experience doing this kind of thing by now, so if they can't pull it off I do wonder who's going to.

But at the same time, none of the Android OEMs delivered with a compelling tablet at a reasonable price before Google got involved. There was the XOOM, but that was exorbitantly expensive and feature-incomplete at launch. Every other Android tablet was also either too expensive or too crappy until the first Kindle Fire came along--and that one hurts the Android tablet market even more with its forked OS and exclusion of Google apps.

For the same money, you can get a unsed iPad, possibly even iPad2 is you shop patiently on craigslist. Unless you absolutely positively mindlessly hate Apple, why wouldn't you? Kindle Fire HD has failed to provide an adequate answer to this question, in my opinion. Several companies have taken a stab at the iPad with the Xoom, Galaxy Tab, and Nexus 7 being the best. The Kindle Fire showed promise but came up short. The Fire HD? If bloatware is your business model, I am sticking with Apple. Charging me to remove bloatware is not going to win you any favors.

About what I expected from an Ars review in the tablet space. They've disliked the Fire from the beginning, and spent virtually no time with its unique features just as they did here. Furthermore, they never did a followup given the fact that Amazon released three major updates to the firmware of the first before Christmas, addressing most of the original criticisms. Something tells me they won't bother to follow up on this one either.

Virtually every other review of the FireHD has been very positive so far. While there are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the device, "Not simply using basic Android" is not one of them. Do we bash on Macs for "not just using Windows" or on a given Linux box for "not using Ubuntu"? Android is a branch of Linux, and we should embrace and encourage original thinking rather than just giving ourselves for free to Google. I'd like to see an article that actually took seriously the very different privacy implications for an Amazon(or B&N) device vs a device like the Nexus 7.

Meh, Ars reviews on tablets and phones have been questionable at best for a while now. Guess it was too much to hope for anything better this time around. I'll content myself with the fact that Nexus sales fell off a cliff after the first couple weeks, and that yet again the leaders this holiday are likely to be Apple and Amazon, with Microsoft as a dark horse with Surface.

Can't wait to see the inevitable Ars bash on Surface. You know its coming.

Actually, Ars' review of the original lined up pretty much identically with the actual experience of the one person I know who actually got a Fire last year: it didn't do anything better than any of the competitors, and lots of things worse. The main thing those firmware updates did functionally for the fellow I knew with one was make it harder for people to load vanilla Android: it certainly didn't make the email better, etc.

What is it that you see that the Fire actually offers as a benefit over, say, the Nexus 7 (at the same price point)?

For one better hardware. Twice the storage, a better GPU, better wifi, etc etc. Furthermore, the original Fire was updated no less than five times in the first few months, each one incrementally improving perf and adding features(most but not all minor refinements). Amazon supported it and continues to support it, and they have a true long term support commitment, even the original Kindle from 2007 retains support and gets new features.

One of the irritations I have with the original Fire review was Ars resistance to following up. We hear all the time about how crappy support is for released Android devices, Amazon was one of the few who kept supporting their Android device, but no mention of that in this review, or a followup on the original.

Casey, you can sideload most Android apps from the Google Play store, so I am at a loss as to why you couldn't run a decent benchmark.

I mean, complaining about the sparse content on the Amazon store is valid from a user perspective - most users are certainly never going to figure out how to sideload - but as a reviewer, it's really not too much to ask.

Casey is not a highly technical reviewer and refuses to go out of her way to learn anything about how to properly evaluate hardware. There are half a dozen ways to test wifi performance, unfortunately she did not bother to try any of them.

For the same money, you can get a unsed iPad, possibly even iPad2 is you shop patiently on craigslist. Unless you absolutely positively mindlessly hate Apple, why wouldn't you? Kindle Fire HD has failed to provide an adequate answer to this question, in my opinion. Several companies have taken a stab at the iPad with the Xoom, Galaxy Tab, and Nexus 7 being the best. The Kindle Fire showed promise but came up short. The Fire HD? If bloatware is your business model, I am sticking with Apple. Charging me to remove bloatware is not going to win you any favors.

Because the iPad is not available in a 7" size. Comparing the iPad to the Nexus or Fire is silly, they target different use scenarios.

I really wonder if Google didn't set the bar with the Nexus 7 features/price such that it's going to be really difficult for the free market to compete with it, ultimately harming the Android tablet market even while making what seems like a solid device. (With IMHO the first great tablet ad campaign from someone that isn't Apple, really solid all the way around.)

A little too early to make that call, but Amazon is a big company, with deep pockets, and experience doing this kind of thing by now, so if they can't pull it off I do wonder who's going to.

Or it's Google's way of sticking it to Amazon (and Barnes and Noble) for taking Android and fragmenting it more. Google doesn't invest all that money into Android to just offer a free OS to anyone to pick apart as they see fit. Sure, they don't restrict you from doing so, but they really want to use it to drive adoption of thier services and their ads, not Amazon's.

Correction: All icons can be removed from the carousels on both the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. Just hold your finger on the icon and a prompt pops up to remove it or add it to your favorites. The new feature of removing the web browser is a nice touch on the Kindle Fire HD.

For the same money, you can get a unsed iPad, possibly even iPad2 is you shop patiently on craigslist. Unless you absolutely positively mindlessly hate Apple, why wouldn't you? Kindle Fire HD has failed to provide an adequate answer to this question, in my opinion. Several companies have taken a stab at the iPad with the Xoom, Galaxy Tab, and Nexus 7 being the best. The Kindle Fire showed promise but came up short. The Fire HD? If bloatware is your business model, I am sticking with Apple. Charging me to remove bloatware is not going to win you any favors.

You sound like the kind of people who ask me "Why did you buy a Mustang when you could get a used BMW 3-series instead?"

Virtually every other review of the FireHD has been very positive so far.

Which just tells me virtually every other reviewer is not doing their job. Positive reviews teach nothing; critical reviews give you a point of dissection to compare against personal experience, or the experience of others, or against other criticisms, to form a balanced opinion.

"Positive" is marketing. "Critical" is a review.

No, a "Positive" review is a review where the reviewer felt that the object being reviewed met or exceeded expectations (or simply liked it). Returning a "Positive" review has nothing to do with the quality or value of the review, however the quality of the review may make you more willing to agree with an author's positive conclusion about the device.

This comment is amazingly weird from an Ars moderator, a site that proudly wears it's "we're a blog, not journalists, everything we write is our opinion." badge. Are you accusing every author here that has given his/her opinion in a review of failing at their job?